Anna Pizzey

Bega is a simplified sans serif typeface. Formal reduction plays a strong role in its design. This is most visible in its ‘spurlessness.’ The visible strokes (or spurs) have been eliminated from the letterforms that would typically feature them. The lack of spurs in Bega is most-clearly visible when you look at the top-left corners of letters like ‘m’, ‘n’, and ‘r’. The Bega family includes eight weights, which range from Thin through Black. Each weight has two fonts on offer: An upright font, and an italic. Bega’s italics are obliques; their letterforms are slanted. The strokes of Bega’s letterforms all appear to be monolinear; that doesn’t mean that Bega is without contrast, however. Thanks to the family’s large number of weights – eight really is a lot – you can combine two or more of them with each other to create headlines that exhibit quite a bit of contrast! Each of Bega’s fonts includes a full range of numerators and denominators, to use when typesetting fractions, etc. The font’s numerals are proportional lining figures; these have the same height as Bega’s uppercase letters. The lowercase letters’ ascenders are tall, and they rise up above the tops of the capital letters and numerals. Bega’s friendly look makes it an ideal choice for use in corporate communication design. The typeface was designed by Sabina Chipară and Diana Ovezea.

Ekster is a geometric sans serif typeface from the Parisian designer Ilya Naumoff. Many of its letters are simplified; you’ll find several places in the typeface where the connection of bowls to stems isn’t fussy, for example, and horizontal strokes – like those in the ‘f’ and the ’t’ along the x-height – don’t bisect their letters’ main vertical stems (but populate the left-hand side only instead). Ekster’s lowercase ‘u’ is also symmetrical. The family includes a staggering number of weights – eight in total, and these range from Thin through Black. Each weight has both an upright font and an oblique-style italic on offer. The letterforms in all of the Ekster weights are drawn with virtually monolinear strokes. Ekster’s x-height is moderate, and the lowercase’s ascenders rise up to the same height as the capital letters and the numerals. However, the best feature of Ekster’s fonts is the large number of alternates that they contain. Ekster includes alternate forms for almost every lowercase letter, and some even have more than one alternate available – like the ‘a’, ‘e’, and ‘r’. Ekster is an excellent choice for use in both corporate design and editorial design projects, both because of its range of font weights and styles as well as because of its legibility in text.